Villamar

Villamar has 2,872 inhabitants in the Marmilla, and in Sardinian it is still called Mara Arbarei, "marsh of the giudicato of Arborea"; in the fourteenth century it was the chief town of the curatoria of Marmilla. In 1409 the king of Aragon Martin I granted it in fief to Gerardo Dedoni as a reward for services rendered to the kingdom, in 1643 the fief became a county and passed to the Aymerich, and from them the village bought itself back when feudalism was abolished. Today the walls of the houses are covered with murals.

The reason to come this far, though, is inside the church of San Giovanni Battista: a retablo more than seven metres high, painted in tempera and gold on panel by Pietro Cavaro and finished in 1518. Don Salvatore Aymerich had commissioned it for a grace received, the birth of his son. The subject is the Madonna del Latte, the nursing Virgin, an iconography that had passed from Coptic Egypt into Byzantine culture and from there to the west. And the painter signed and dated it, in a very fine Gothic minuscule along the edges: pinsit hoc retabolum Petri Cavaro pictor minimus Stampacis, "Pietro Cavaro painted this retablo, least of painters, of Stampace", the quarter of Cagliari he came from. In the central niche stands a wooden Madonna attributed to the Neapolitan sculptor Giovanni da Nola.